A packet switch may be logically and/or physically separated into a forwarding plane and a control plane. The forwarding plane may forward a packet received on one port of the packet switch to one or more other ports of the packet switch based at least on a destination address of the packet. The packet may be addressed to a device in communication with the packet switch.
However, some packets received by the packet switch may be addressed to the packet switch itself. The forwarding plane may forward these packets to the control plane, which may subsequently process these packets. Other packets may also be forwarded to the control plane. For example, layer-two control protocol packets may be forwarded to the control plane.
In some configurations, an amount of time consumed by the forwarding plane in forwarding a packet to a destination port of the packet switch may be significantly less than an amount of time consumed by the control plane in receiving a packet from the forwarding plane and processing the received packet. This time difference may be especially large if the forwarding plane is implemented primarily in hardware and the control plane is implemented primarily by a processor executing software.